I tried this on my machine up to the point of trying to view the stream locally on my VLC but - as I expected - it did not work.

Here's why: very quickly after purchasing ran into a major limitation of the Hybrid (and of the Miglia TVMini HD) - it does not create a buffer for regular analog TV. Since it doesn't create a buffer, there's no file that CyTV (or VLC) can publish, therefore CyTV and VLC can currently *only* stream out HD when used in combination with the Hybrid or any other tuner that relies on the system for encoding will have this limitation. Additionally, the Hybrid doesn't receive ClearQAM (free HD via cable), so unless you have a digital antenna connected to it, there's no way to receive any HD, and consequently no way for this VLC setup or CyTV to work.

The issue seems odd - I can record SD with no problem. If I was willing to start a recording and devote hard drive space to effectively creating my own unlimited "buffer", I could stream live TV using this solution. But the drawbacks are considerable: I would have to set this up again every time I used it (there would be no "standard" name for the mpeg file) and it would consume a significant amount of hard drive space depending on how long I left it running. I don't understand why ElGato didn't at least include the option to buffer SD TV and allow the user to decide whether the performance hit was worth it or not.

Lastly, you mention in the article that this will work with SD and HD. I know that there are some Mac-compatible products that have hardware encoders for SD, and some that have hardware encoders for HD, but I don't know of any that do both, although I'm very interested in finding one. Could you let us know which product you're using and if this works for you in SD as well?